[Beowulf] Re: torus versus (fat) tree topologies

[Bill Broadley]

> i believe we are a bargain in the 2-128 range - at the very least competitive, at many points cheap. check it out and make your own minds up.

I was surprised at the pricing, having heard some fairly pricey numbers,
surprisingly under the "buy quadrics" button on the quadrics site
is a price list, note the prices include switch, cable, and adapter:
http://doc.quadrics.com/Quadrics/QuadricsHome.nsf/DisplayPages/877AD01C0B06EC0680256E510059247D
or
http://tinyurl.com/426z8

Myrinet list pricing is similarly easy to find:
http://www.myrinet.com/myrinet/product_list.html

Dolphin/SCI was easy to find as well:
http://www.dolphinics.com/cgi-bin/pricing.pl

I could not however easily find a complete list of Infiniband prices
anywhere.  Most all vendors I tried require requesting a quote.  Does
anyone have a nice online source for such pricing?

I notice that the top 3 [1] volume commodity [2] interconnects 
all making pricing easily available:
* Myrinet 38.6%
* GigE    35.2%
* Quadrics 4.0%

Surprisingly (to me) I found all 3 on froogle, granted quadrics was
via ebay.  Myrinet and GigE were also on pricewatch.com

[1] As listed by http://www.top500.org/sublist/stats/index.php?list=2004-11-30&type=conn&submit=1
[2] My definition is commodity is that I can pick my CPU/node and then
    buy the interconnect.

-- 
Bill Broadley
Computational Science and Engineering
UC Davis